"Not at first. She was cautious at first."
He nodded. "Scary woman. Even before she tried to kill me. Almost not human. There is a sort of desperation to her, like I've seen with drug addicts who can't get their drug." He shrugged. "I wouldn't cross her. She didn't really care about anything else. She just wanted that map."
"My organization has a history of dealing with desperate and dangerous people," Goth reassured him.
He looked warily at her. "How did you get in here?"
He'd earned some sort of misleading comfort—which would help to protect her too, Goth decided. "Your bathroom window."
He actually looked faintly relieved. "So . . . What are you going to do to me?" he asked warily, his little weasely eyes looking for a way out.
"Tie you up and leave. You have told me what I wanted to know. Or rather confirmed it. We'll deal with the rest of them. But just one word of warning. You take one step out of line with Pausert or his mother, and . . ." She drew a finger across her throat. "He has some very powerful relations." That was the best word she could come up with on the spur of the moment.
Franco took "relations" as meaning something entirely different to the grand-nephew of Captain Threbus. "Oh. I didn't know," he said, sweating anew. There were some powerful crime families in the Empire. The Shinn-Borozo were almost a law unto themselves.
"Now you do. Leave him alone. We'll be watching. Now turn around and put your hands behind your back."
He did. Goth tied his hands with some rope from his own stock. She did a good job of it and gagged him with a piece of cloth before tying his feet. She then went through his pockets. By the way his eyes bulged, he assumed he was going to be robbed, but all she did was to remove his blaster and the key. She unlocked the door. "You should be able to wiggle your way over and kick it," she said. "At the moment you are worth more to us alive than dead. Better hope neither I nor my friends have to come to see you again, because that may mean that that has changed."
She stepped into the noisome bathroom and assumed no-shape. Franco was already frantically wriggling his way across the floor to the door.
It took a little while to get clear of the building—she had to wait until the bodyguard left to go and fetch someone to repair the bathroom window—and then she still had to walk home. But she felt that it had been an evening well spent. And she had got part of the way through the set-work book! Tomorrow she would be the good little schoolgirl Vala again. But for tonight, she was back to being Goth of Karres. All that was missing was the captain.
Then . . . she'd have to brave the Nikkeldepain central records office. She had a feeling that dealing with that creep Franco might be easier. She was getting some idea of Nikkeldepain's obsessive bureaucracy by now.
"What do you mean by 'alien values of wealth'?" asked the Leewit. The Leewit had a healthy interest in treasure and finance. Goth was good at it too, the captain recalled, rather nostalgically. He remembered her delight at figuring out the
Venture
's cargo values for the Daal's officials, and working out cargo and passenger rates—and searching for the Agandar's loot.
Mebeckey shrugged. "Things which were valuable to an alien species. That had collector's value, but were of no use to humans. Much of it we didn't understand. But it was plainly a mixture between a fortress and a palace. There were no jewels. If there were ornaments, they were things that looked like lumps of coal. There were many bones. Everything was very uniform, very ordered. There were thousands of patterned long planting-beds of dusty earth, all the same. There was alien machinery. Weapons not designed for human limbs. There were freighter loads of stuff that did have a value. Rare metals. The treasure of dozens of worlds that they'd conquered—some of it they had plainly understood as little as we understood them."
His expression got a little dreamy. "For a little while I had made the greatest find of xenoarcheological treasure anyone ever has, and I was rich beyond my imagining. But we kept going deeper. Looking for the source of the radio signal. We should have loaded the
Kapurnia
and got out. But greed kept us going deeper."
"And what did you find down there?" asked Pausert, warily.
"We found a stasis box of some kind. I cleared the area. Wanted to send the Waldo-robot down."
He sighed. "My associates were perhaps less scrupulous than they should have been. One of my assistants sneaked back. Or hid herself and remained behind. She opened it as soon as we were out of sight."
He sighed again. "We heard her scream. And we ran back. But by then it was too late."
"Why?"
"She'd opened the stasis box."
"And . . ."
"It had been full of the dust—and she was covered in it."
"Dust," said the Leewit. She'd plainly, by the tone of voice, been expecting treasure.
"Everything becomes dust eventually, child. I expect their stasis box hadn't worked," said the captain, faintly relieved.
Mebeckey shook his head. "It had worked perfectly. It had preserved viably what it was meant to preserve. We just didn't recognize it for what it was."
"So what was it?"
"Seeds of a kind," said Mebeckey, his voice quavering slightly. "Or spores, perhaps. Everything was so different that we should have guessed that the aliens were not an animal life-form. We are animals that eat plants and other animals. . . . These were plants that used animals to grow in, and to disperse their spores. I say 'plants' but really they were all one plant. One vast telepathically linked plant, with various lifestages, with only one vegetative goal: to cover all, to harvest, to bring back to the mother-plant, to breed, to create more seedlings in the motiles, to spread, to cover all, to harvest, to bring back to the mother-plant, to breed, to create more seedlings in the motiles to cover all, to harvest, to bring back to the mother-plant, to create more seedlings."
His voice had become a monotone, his eyes glazed, and he was was plainly caught in the hypnotic repetitive chanting. The captain interrupted. "We get the point. But how do you know all this?"
"And what were the bones from, if it was a plant?" demanded the Leewit.
He looked calmly at them. "Because I too became part of the mother-plant. The haploid stage takes over animal life. Marshi got most of the spores, but the rest of us must have breathed in a few. She was the dominant plant. It grew in us, spreading hyphae through us, taking over our nervous systems and then our bodies. That's what it does, until it is ready to sporify. Then it begins to grow rapidly, devouring the host, using the animal for nutrients and producing millions of spores, haploid spores, that then mix and make new mother-plants—which are all part of the great mother-plant."
"What?" Pausert had his blaster out, pointed at Mebeckey. "Are you telling me you're full of some alien parasite?"
The man shook his head. "Not anymore. I was. It controlled me. But at least one of my crew may still be. My assistant Marshi, the woman who got most of it. Except she was not part of my crew anymore. She'd just become part of the plant."
"You mean this plant is out there, spreading?"
"No," said Mebeckey. "Well, they must have some spores with them. But they need Melchin to finish the life-cycle. The species they coevolved with, that they used as reproductive hosts. They can live in other animals, but not finish the breeding cycle. They left me there, left me to seek for the Illtraming. I don't know if they survived."
"I get the feeling that there are big gaps in this story," said Pausert. "And I don't like it. Who or what is the Illtraming?"
"The mother-plant used its motiles—Melchin that had been infected with the haploid stage—to colonize other places, then continents, then planets. Only, somewhere . . . the Melchin hosts were infected by some disease before sporification. It killed the mother-plant haploids in the hosts. It did not kill the Melchin hosts. They survived. And bred. They are the Illtraming. The Melchin who are no longer ruled by the mother-plant. They are the mother-plant's most deadly enemies, with a fear and hatred of the mother-plant as deep as the universe. And also the mother-plant's only hope of survival. The bones we found . . . the bones are all that is left of the hosts, the Melchin. The haploid mother-plant can manage with a female human host. But to produce viable spores they need a male Melchin. And then more Melchin to breed for hosts. My crew—or what used to be my crew—left me so they could go and search for Illtraming."
"Why didn't they just take you too?" asked Vezzarn.
"I tried to get to them." He held up his scarred hands. "But I had locked myself in when I started getting the shakes. I was scared they'd think I was infected with some alien disease and kill me. I was scared that they had been infected. I still thought it was a disease. It took a while to become one with the plant, and its control of the nervous system took a while too. And then it takes control. It can't properly read your mind or know what you know. You are just part of the plant. And the plant didn't know how to open the lock. I could have picked it, but the mother-plant couldn't control enough dexterity or access my memories sufficiently. It tried, but I think I only had one spore, and I think the more plants the more complete the control. Anyway, I was trapped. Then maybe the plant needed something more than my body could supply. It was adapted to parasitize Melchin, not humans—although it could use other animals, just not to breed. The plant mind faded and I was myself again. Alone. Alone!"
"In the meantime those are some blips on our screen, Captain," said Vezzarn, pointing. "It looks like the Phantom ships are back."
Mebeckey looked at the screen too, at the fast approaching needle shapes. "Melchin. Or maybe even Illtraming."
"What?"
"Xenoarcheologists have found Melchin-mother-plant ruins and the wreck of a ship. And there are Nartheby Sprite illustrations. That's what their ships look like."
Goth found herself negotiating several morasses. First, there was the morass of high school politics. Yes, she could physically and mentally dominate almost any individual there. But as a group, as a system . . . well, it was like wading through thigh-deep, sticky mud.
The same could be said of her attempts to make head or tail of the bureaucracy that had enmeshed her father's estate. The locals seemed to delight in paperwork for paperwork's sake. It took her a full week of early morning prowling to find the right file. She found that in between keeping house for herself and seeing to the demands of schoolwork, she had a limited amount of time that could be spared to peruse the files through the jungle of the Nikkeldepain Central Records Office. Gaining entrance to that had been easy enough. She'd let them lock her in in no-shape one evening, and had then arranged to be able to get back in via the fire-escape door whenever she wanted to. The next difficulty had been that she did not want to switch on lights and call attention to herself—and a paper chase in a huge dark building was impossible. So she'd had to settle for the early mornings, before the office opened, and before she had to go to school. There was a strong temptation to simply set fire to the entire place, except she suspected that would just make for more complications.
Eventually she tracked the file down. It was a very thick folder. Marked "confidential." She decided that she could trust herself.
She soon discovered, as she dug through it, that the paper-chase society gathered everything, even though it now had computerized records. It had copies of the logs of various expeditionary voyages. It was surprising how far afield he had roamed—even, from what she could work out, into the Chaladoor—before escaping Worm Weather there. There were reports of various "misdemeanors." To Goth they were obvious klatha flares. There were tax returns. Medical details. And a final report on the last voyage. Which went nowhere near the Iverdahl System. Or the Talsoe Twins. An addendum appended to that log did however give Goth pause. It bore the crest of the Imperial Security Service, and took the form of a query about one Captain Threbus. And it related to two things: the prohibited planet of Karres—it appeared Threbus had been seen in the company of a suspected Karres witch, in the Regency of Hailie—where there was no record of his ever having been. The second query in the letter related to the missing Lieutenant-Commander Kaen, a distinguished young officer in the Imperial Space Navy married to Pausert's mother. It appeared that he had vanished at much the same time as Captain Threbus. The log data put Threbus's last entry to within a few light-weeks of where Kaen was last known to have been.
Goth slapped her head in irritation. The log was a forgery, put together, as she happened to know, to lead away from Karres. To lead as far away as possible. The fact that it placed the
Venture
on the rather troubled and unstable border that Lieutenant-Commander Kaen had been assigned to was pure happenstance. At least, she assumed so. With Karres and klatha, sometimes coincidence wasn't. But no wonder they were suspicious about declaring Threbus dead. Karres was going to have to do something about the ISS, now that it could. And in the meantime, she'd clear out these inconvenient records.
Or would she? Given the fact that Pausert's mother—and the various lawyers she'd hired—had caused this file to be dug up rather often, and that Threbus was well-known and remembered, it could just make things worse. She needed to be a bit more subtle.
Like coping with high school's hidden mudholes, she might get further by not just blundering in. Next big step was going to have to be the Imperial embassy. They could certainly provide confirmation that Threbus wasn't alive. She just wished that she had the Daal of Uldune's skilled forgers to do it for her, instead of having to try to do it herself. In the meantime there were short-term measures. She'd looked up the Threbus Institute's records while she was at it. She wondered if it had ever occurred to Pausert's mother that she was, in a technical sense, employing herself. Threbus still was the majority owner of the unit. It didn't make a fortune, but it could afford to give her a raise.